Taxes: If President Obama wants to create a fairer country, shouldn’t he start by fairly portraying our tax code? Instead, he used his State of the Union speech to peddle a number of blatant tax falsehoods.

In his speech, Obama repeatedly turned to the tax code to explain what’s wrong with the country. It favors the rich, he said. It benefits companies that send jobs abroad. It subsidizes the dirty old oil industry. It’s the cause of our deficit problem. And worst of all, plenty of people and businesses aren’t paying their “fair share.”

None of it is true.

But that hasn’t stopped Obama from repeating them every chance he gets, hoping that no one will notice or that his critics will get tired of correcting the record.

Since we don’t fall into either category, here are the facts behind Obama’s State of the Union tax deceptions.

• “We need to change our tax code so that people like me, and an awful lot of members of Congress, pay our fair share of taxes.”

The claim that the rich don’t pay their fair share is simply untrue. The current tax code is extremely progressive, more progressive in fact than it was back in 1979, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

As a result, the richest 1% today accounts for 36% of all income taxes paid, while nearly half of taxpayers owe nothing at all, or get cash back.

If that isn’t fair, Obama owes it to the country to describe just what sort of distribution would be fair.

• “Right now, because of loopholes and shelters in the tax code, a quarter of all millionaires pay lower tax rates than millions of middle-class households.”

Even Obama’s own Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, couldn’t back up this claim when asked about it by reporters.

And no wonder, since there’s not a shred of evidence to support it.

Internal Revenue Service data show that families with incomes of $50,000 to $100,000 pay an average 8.9% in income taxes, while those with incomes of more than $1 million pay 23%.

It may be the case that a few rich folks manage to get away with paying little in taxes, but that’s clearly the exception, not the rule.

• “Right now, we’re poised to spend nearly $1 trillion more on what was supposed to be a temporary tax break for the wealthiest 2% of Americans.”

The fact is that tax payments by the rich went up during the Bush years, despite the intervening tax cut. In fact, in 2007 the richest 1% paid $84 billion more in taxes than they did before Bush took office.

The bottom half, in contrast, paid $6 billion less, IRS data show.

• “Do we want to keep these tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans? Or do we want to keep our investments in everything else? Because if we’re serious about paying down our debt, we can’t do both.”

The idea that the nation’s budget problems can be resolved by hiking taxes on the rich is ludicrous.

Even if you managed to take all their money, you still couldn’t close the budget gap.

Obama should know this, especially since his own debt reduction commission told him so.

In a Washington Post op-ed, commission heads Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles explained: “We can’t simply cut or tax our way out of this problem. Bringing our debt under control will require tackling the growth of entitlements and reforming the tax code to promote economic growth.”

But you’ll search Obama’s speech in vain for any ideas along these lines.

• “Right now, companies get tax breaks for moving jobs and profits overseas.”

This is an old chestnut among Democrats. John Kerry ran on this claim during his 2004 presidential campaign. But it’s a phony issue.

The real problem isn’t some alleged unfair tax break for unpatriotic companies; it’s that the U.S. has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, which drives companies to shift operations abroad.

But instead of lowering corporate rates overall, Obama talks about adding an alternative minimum tax on multinationals (apparently not realizing there’s already a corporate AMT).

• “We’ve subsidized oil companies for a century. … It’s time to end the taxpayer giveaways to an industry that rarely has been more profitable.”

What Obama is talking about are basic tax credits and deductions available to every other industry. Oil companies aren’t raking in billions through subsidies specific only to them. Nor do they receive direct taxpayer-funded payments. In fact, the industry accounts for $92 billion a year in tax revenues.

Targeting oil companies for special punishment just because Obama and his environmentalist cronies don’t like them is the very definition of unfairness.

What’s truly unfair about the tax code is that it punishes the economy with grinding complexity and disincentives to invest and grow.

Any hope of fixing that will have to wait until someone else is giving State of the Union speeches.

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